Published by Niall Devitt, Btb Business Training

I have been really busy of late, so apologies for taking so long to follow up on my original post on handling objections. The first commonplace objection that I would like to talk about as part of this series is the “price objection”

This objection is sometimes misunderstood in that when a prospect objects to cost, what the prospect is really objecting to is the value/s he currently perceives related to the cost.

Unfortunately this misread of the situation can often prompt the salesperson to discount in an attempt to fix the concern. This is bad practice for two reasons namely:

1. If the prospect is not presently convinced as to the value of your product, giving away 5-10% discount is highly unlikely to make much of a real difference to the prospect buying.
2. By offering discount, all you may actually be doing is serving to confirm for the prospects that their original valuation was correct, therefore making it even more difficult on yourself to convince otherwise.

So how then do you effectively deal with a price objection?As with any objection, the first step is always to qualify.

The reason you do this is because what may sometimes first seem like a one objection can ultimately be another objection altogether such as competitors etc, In others words, when a prospect says “your price is too expensive” what he may not be telling you is “your competitor is offering me the same product, but for less money” So before you start to deal with any objection, always make sure you are dealing with the real/focal objection.

For the purpose of this post, price will remain our focal objection or as we discussed at the start, the real issue, which is the lack of value/s, the prospect presently perceives related to the cost.

So in this instance, what has happened is that the salesperson originally failed to convince the prospect that there are enough benefits attached to that cost, so therefore dealing with a price objection is straight forward once you know how.

To increase the prospect’s current valuation of your product, you need to convince the prospect that there are:

1. More benefits than he currently perceives and/or
2. More scope in relation to these benefits

Tags: Dealing with sales objections, handling sales objections, overcoming sales objections, price objection

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.